Using Twitter’s Lead-Gen Card to Recruit Beta Testers

It turns out that it’s pretty easy to co-opt Twitter’s Lead Generation card for anything where you want to gather a bunch of e-mail addresses from your Twitter community. I was looking for people willing to alpha test a little side project of mine, and it worked great and didn’t cost anything.

You also need to configure a fallback URL, which is where people will go if they don’t have a Twitter client capable of the one-click signup. I used a Google form, which let people give me their e-mail addresses directly.

And that’s it! Tweet enthusiastically, then wait patiently, because if you don’t integrate your Twitter card with your CRM, you have to wait ~24 hours for the download link to appear in the Twitter cards manager. The resulting CSV looks like this:

A little bit of awk later and I had a list of e-mails ready to go. I ended up getting 49 responses through the Google form and 197 through the Twitter card. It was easy and I’ll definitely do this next time I need to collect people’s e-mail addresses for a project.